1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to backup and restoration of data within computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The increasing need to protect client and application data through backup and restore applications has led to ever more complex storage device configurations. Many of these configurations include disk-based storage. Disk-based storage may be preferred for data protection applications that require high-speed backup and restore performance and high-reliability, long-lived storage media. In order to provide higher capacity at lower cost in disk-based data protection systems, a variety of disk arrays may be utilized. Some of the configurations use to increase available disk capacity include commodity, attached disks, disks attached via a storage area network (SAN), and network attached storage (NAS), among others.
Unfortunately, with the increasing number of storage configurations comes an increased administrative burden. It may not be sufficient to specify a target storage location for backup-related operations with nothing more than a POSIX directory specification. In order to make efficient use of the available disk-based storage, backup applications may need to consider numerous configuration details about the location of the physical storage device, access paths, networking details, access credentials, among others. In addition, backup applications may unknowingly be configured to make resource allocation decisions that are at odds with site or installation policies. Backup applications may also be configured in a way that results in suboptimal performance due to a lack of knowledge of the details of the network path connecting the protected client and the disk-based storage.
Previous efforts to manage storage configurations used a combination of disparate tools, each designed to enable configuration of a particular resource without consideration of larger network issues. Unfortunately, such combinations have not provided administrators with a way to achieve fine-grained control of the increasingly complex network of storage resources used to provide data protection. In view of the above, an effective system and method for managing the configuration of disk-based resources that accounts for these issues is desired.